Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

Gloria knew what Tatiana was going to say.And the worst thing was that she had believed it even before the name was said, so she said it first.

“Graham,” she said flatly.

“Yes,” Tatiana agreed. “Graham. He is very bad man. He told Terry to kill her. Same thing as killing her himself. No difference.”

“No,” Gloria agreed. “No difference. No difference at all.”

“Lena was going to cops, tell everything she knew.”

“What did she know? About the fraud?”

Tatiana laughed. “Fraud is nothing, Gloria. Many worse things than fraud. Graham’s in business with very, very bad men. You don’t want to know, they come after you. We really have to go now.”

Gloria leaned closer to her husband and whispered in his ear,

“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

They had left the scene of a murder. They were making a real get-away. Gloria was breaking rules, although not her own. She had rescued the black plastic bag of cash and the Memory Stick, but other than that they were fleeing in the clothes they stood up in. Tatiana had made a phone call, and a big black car had driven up to the back door and they had stepped in it. It was, if Gloria wasn’t mistaken, the same car that had picked Tatiana up from the hospital after Graham’s heart attack. The driver remained mute throughout their journey, and Gloria didn’t ask who the black car belonged to. Big black cars with blacked-out windows tended to belong to bad people.

They were driving south, toward the airport, but Gloria had requested “a little detour.”

“Why?”Tatiana asked.

“Business,” Gloria said as the mute driver followed her instruc-tions and turned off the main road and onto a housing estate. “A little unfinished business.” “Glencrest Way,” Tatiana announced, reading the street sign.

Glencrest Way was followed by Glencrest Close, Glencrest Avenue, Glencrest Road, Glencrest Gardens, and Glencrest Wynd, the ti-tles of all of which Tatiana insisted on reciting, like an exotic replacement for the black car’s satellite navigation system, which refused to work among the baffling complexity of the housing es-tate’s streets, shielded by the lingering fog of Graham’s presence, the cloud of knowing.

“The Glencrest Estate,” Gloria said rather redundantly as the black car drew to a halt at the curbside. “Real Homes for Real People. Built on old mine workings.” She hauled out the black plastic garbage bag that contained seventy-three thousand, five hundred pounds in twenty-pound notes.

Tatiana leaned against the side of the car and smoked while Gloria dragged the black plastic bag from house to house, distrib-uting bundles of notes on the doorsteps. Not enough for every-one, but then life was a lottery.

“Is tragedy,” Tatiana said, shaking her head. “You’re one crazy person, Gloria.”

They climbed back in the black car and drove away. The bun-dles of notes weren’t tied together, and the evening breeze began to lift them and toss them around like giant flakes of ash. In the rearview mirror Gloria caught a glimpse of someone coming out of one of Graham’s mean houses-a “Braecroft”-and looking as-tonished at the sight of money flying around in the air.

Feared by the bad, loved by the good. They were bandit queens, they were robber girls. They were outlaws.

Black space. White light. Applause. The applause sounded quite vigorous to Jackson’s ears, but then, apart from a couple of critics, the audience was weighted with friends and family and hangers-on. He was tonight’s representative of all those things for Julia, and he had managed to miss the entire performance, slipping in at the back of the theater just in time to see the cast taking their bow. Jackson knew that murder and mayhem weren’t good enough excuses for missing Julia’s show. Perhaps he should have turned up covered in blood after all.

In the bar afterward the entire cast was giddy with relief, like an overexcited nursery-school class. Tobias made a performance out of making sure everyone had champagne and then giving an extravagant, congratulatory toast that Jackson stopped listening to halfway through. “To us!” they all concluded, clinking their glasses high.

Julia put her arm through his and rested her head against his shoulder.

“How was it for you?” he asked, and he felt her wilt slightly against him.

“Bloody awful,” she said. “Whole chunks of that scene on the iceberg went AWOL and that idiot boy didn’t give me any of the right lines.”

“Scott Marshall? Your lover? ”

Julia removed her arm from his.

“Still, you were great,” he said, wishing he himself was a better actor. “You were really great.”

Julia downed her glass of champagne in one. “And,” she said, “when that usher came down the aisles and actually asked if there was a doctor in the house-I mean, not that I wasn’t sorry for the man who had the heart attack, but trying to carry on as if nothing were going on…”

“These things happen,” Jackson said soothingly.

“Yes, they do, but not in tonight’s show , Jackson,” she snapped. “You weren’t there, were you? You managed to miss my opening night! What happened that was so important? Did someone die? Or did someone just say, ‘Help me, Jackson’ ?”

“Well, as it happens-”

“You are so fucking predictable.”

“Calm down.”

“Calm down?” Never say that to a woman, it was on the first page of the handbook that didn’t come with them. “I will not fucking calm down.” She lit a cigarette, sucking deeply on it as if it contained Ventolin.

“You shouldn’t,” he said (words also advised against in the hand-book). “You know you’re going to have to stop smoking. And drinking.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”

“I don’t know.”There was a new fury in her eyes, a challenge that he knew he shouldn’t pick up. And it was ridiculous. It wasn’t how he had envisaged this moment at all. He had imagined candles, flowers, a loving-kindness enveloping them both like a shawl. “Because you’re pregnant,” Jackson said.

“So?” She tilted her chin up defiantly and blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, where it joined the polluted cloud above their heads.

“So?” he echoed irritably. “What does that mean? So? ”This conversation shouldn’t be taking place in a dingy bar crowded with noisy people, but he couldn’t think how to maneuver her out of the building. He wondered how she had planned to give him the news. The annunciation. The preciousness of it all was being horribly stained. Then a terrible thought struck him. “You weren’t planning to get rid of it, were you?”

She gave him a cold, level look. “Get rid of it?”

“A termination. Jesus, Julia, you can’t be thinking of doing that.” He almost said, “This might be your only chance,” but somehow or other he managed to block that one.

“Just because I’ve got big tits doesn’t necessarily make me ma-ternal, Jackson.”

“Julia, you would make a wonderful mother.” She would. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t want to experience motherhood. They had never talked about children, they had talked about marriage but never about children. Why was that? How could a man and a woman have a relationship and not discuss that?

“We’ve never talked about having children, Jackson. And it’s my body and my life.”

“My baby,” he said.

She raised an eyebrow. “ Your baby?”

“Our baby,” he amended. Something passed across her face, an immense sadness and regret. She shook her head and stubbed the cigarette out in an ashtray on the bar. Then she looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, Jackson. It’s not. It’s not yours.”